What's not to like about solid state drives? They are light, fast, require low power consumption, and easily accommodate different form factors. Samsung wants commercial and users to remember those advantages as it sets out to become a formidable market leader in a fast-growth SSD marketplace.

While Samsung is best known to mass market consumers for its smartphones and other consumer electronics, the Korea-based tech leader made it clear on Thursday that it is now staging an all-out foray into new SSD technologies. Samsung announced new entries in its SSD 840 EVO line aimed at the consumer market and the SSD XS1715 line targeting enterprise data center applications.

The company made its intentions loud and clear in Seoul on Thursday at a Samsung SSD Global Summit celebration, themed "SSDs for everyone."

Its 840 EVO lineup carries up to 1TB of storage, with capacities from 120GB up to 1TB, and will be available early August. The five capacities are 120GB, 250GB, 500GB, 750GB, and 1TB. They support various computing environments and IT applications. For the 1TB 840 EVO SSD, the sequential read/write performance has reached 540MB/s and 520MB/s.

For users handling very large data files, the numbers involved in the new lineup will make a difference. Both the random read and write performance have improved, reaching 98,000 IOPS (input output operations per second) and 90,000 IOPS, respectively.

The new SSD XS1715 line targeting enterprise data center storage applications will be ready in the second half of this year.

The enterprise SSD launch is a high-speed 1.6TB NVMe SSD that provides a sequential read speed at 3,000MB/s. Those numbers mean that it can process 500GB of data equivalent to 100 full HD movies 5GB in length in less than three minutes. According to Samsung, the new XS1715 delivers random read performance over 10 times faster than the company's former high-end enterprise storage SSD. The XS1715's random read performance reaches up to 740,000 IOPS.

SSD Heaven, At What Price?

With all these impressive technological advantages to SSDs for home and enterprise use, why is the computing world not entirely SSD? Pricing plays a role in preferences for hard disk drives, the dominant choice for PC makers. In time, however, analysts expect SSD prices will fall.

Samsung is ready to pick up a hefty share of market demand and on Thursday made that strategic intent very clear. "Samsung continues to enhance its SSD brand image by delivering the industry's highest quality solutions and continuously increasing its SSD market share by expanding the adoption of higher density SSDs especially in client PC segments," said Samsung's Young-Hyun Jun.

As for the SSD XS1715, Samsung said that it intends to continue developing a variety of NVMe SSD products over the next several years, with increasingly high performance levels.

Pricing plays no role in the preferences for hard disk drive. Marketing, consumer-ignorance, and business interests do.

Consumers have been educated by marketers that that bigger is better. So they compare a 500GB HD vs. a 120GB SSD and see that 500 is better than 120. They do not question whether they really need that capcity and are blissfully ignorant of the other SSD qualities that make them more desirable. For most users, 120GB is plenty and the retail price difference between a 120GB SSD and a 500 HDD is less than 50$.

If consumers were aware of the speed, reliability, and energy consumption benefit that come with an SSD, they would probably prefer SSDs. But this does not play into the interest of much of the industry.

The business interest of Western Digital and Seagate is to keep milking profits out of their dying technology. The replacement of HDD by SSD has consequences to operating system makers such as Microsoft and Apple and for software makers. SSDs' weakness is that they have a limited number of write cycles. Each time the operating system or an application writes to an SSD, it shortens its remaining life. Current disk writing strategies are generally not SSD-optimized. The positive exception are iOS and Android because those devices run on SSD; and to a lesser extent Linux.